I think the existing system is pretty good. The bottom teams have to get the best players in the draft in an attempt to make all teams competitive. By having a lottery, it eliminates the guarantees of tanking for a draft position.

Perhaps you could lock in the draft position with a month left in the season. That way, losing end-of-season games would not improve your chances of getting a pick.

I think the existing system is pretty good. The bottom teams have to get the best players in the draft in an attempt to make all teams competitive. By having a lottery, it eliminates the guarantees of tanking for a draft position.

Perhaps you could lock in the draft position with a month left in the season. That way, losing end-of-season games would not improve your chances of getting a pick.

Perhaps it helps to retain the local fan interest in the small markets but if the goal is to maximize the total fan interest for the game I'm not convinced. I'm not claiming it's not the best model but I haven't seen anyone make a conclusive case for it. The NFL is doing great with an environment where the Panthers may win one year and 3 years later go 2-14 while the Premiership is doing great with an environment where pretty good teams like Aston Villa, Newcastle and Tottenham hardly have a 1/100 of winning the title.

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I think you will find that NFL fans are far more interested in the game than a large chunk of soccer fans. This is particularly true of international fan bases. Soccer is the home of the fairweather fan, the plastic fan. And I personally think that it is an entirely bad thing that Man U wins the EPL title 2 in every 3 years. How is that a competition? I watch soccer, but we play against teams whose wages are set up to 3x the wages of our best players. That is a frustrating environment to compete in, and it is getting worse. Eventually it will start to kill the sport. I also think it is pathetic, because it is teams like the Latics, the Swansea's who play the most beautiful football. And no one cares about it. I don't care if my Spurs don't win a title, it would be lovely. But I want the title race to be an exciting as the relegation race, because most years, it isn't

But it's the super teams that make the EPL the most successful league in the world when it comes to fan interest. I doubt the international fan base would have been close to where it is now if the Wigans, the West Hams , the Stokes and the Sunderlands of the league would have won a bunch of the titles instead of the giants or been the teams representing the league in the european cups. The almost century long dynasties of what was earlier the big four (Man Utd, Liverpool, Arsenal and since the middle of the 90's Chelsea) is what has created the large fan bases outside England. The same goes for the La Liga with Barca and Real.

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Yes and no. The EPL is such a successful league because it is widely accepted to be the most competitive and highly skilled league in the world. The 'super teams' have just led to a concentration of fairweather fans. They are irrelevant. Broad fan bases are what make sports successful, by concentrating fan bases into a few teams, the whole league suffers. La Liga is widely known as an uncompetitive league. I personally think it is a total joke. People who like soccer will watch soccer. The EPL is the best league. If all that was televised was Blackburn Rovers, Norwich and Aston Villa, I guarantee that there would be more fans of those teams.

Lot of good ideas in here. We can't forget though that it is a business. As a business teams like Charlotte have to give the fans a reason to purchase tickets next season and a reason for advertisers to buy air time next season. No better way to do this in their current situation than to land a top 3 pick.

Maybe the whole lottery model itself is faulty. Maybe if teams knew with a few weeks to go that there was no chance of getting a top 3 because the 3 worst teams were already decided then they would not be tanking.

I think you will find that NFL fans are far more interested in the game than a large chunk of soccer fans. This is particularly true of international fan bases. Soccer is the home of the fairweather fan, the plastic fan.

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I don't think I'll find that. There are a lot of plastic fans but that's just because there are so many fans, the same goes for the NFL. The fan culture in soccer goes alot deeper than the fan culture of the NFL or any other sport.

Yes and no. The EPL is such a successful league because it is widely accepted to be the most competitive and highly skilled league in the world. The 'super teams' have just led to a concentration of fairweather fans. They are irrelevant.

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No, it's the fairweather fans who matter. The hardcore fans will follow no matter what the league does but the fairweather fans needs to be serviced. A fairweather fan who adds revenue is worth more than a hardcore fan who doesn't.

Broad fan bases are what make sports successful, by concentrating fan bases into a few teams, the whole league suffers.

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People keep saying this without providing a convincing case. And no it doesn't. It becomes the most successful and prosperous league in the world.

No, it's the fairweather fans who matter. The hardcore fans will follow no matter what the league does but the fairweather fans needs to be serviced. A fairweather fan who adds revenue is worth more than a hardcore fan who doesn't.

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That's short term revenue v long term revenue. We could argue about this, but bottom line, for me, is that volatile revenue (aka fairweather fans) only happens to the big club, furthering the hegemony and continue the circle of crap. Check out the revenue distribution of the EPL and have a look how that goes over the last 20 years. It's a joke.

People keep saying this without providing a convincing case. And no it doesn't. It becomes the most successful and prosperous league in the world.

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Debatable. In fact, only a small number of clubs actually make money in the EPL. And it ain't Liverpool, Man Utd, Chelsea. Arsenal does, but only because of their huge property business on the side.

So I don't really understand what measure of 'success' you are applying.

That's short term revenue v long term revenue. We could argue about this, but bottom line, for me, is that volatile revenue (aka fairweather fans) only happens to the big club, furthering the hegemony and continue the circle of crap. Check out the revenue distribution of the EPL and have a look how that goes over the last 20 years. It's a joke.

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I don't really see how it's a joke unless you assume large differences is a negative which is the point I'm debating. Looking at the extremes where one team wins every game every season or where the field is leveled instantly so all teams are equally good all the time (if a team wins a game their two best players is moved to the opposing team, penalized with -8p next game or whatever the solution would be) only tells me the optimum is somewhere in between, but I have no idea if it's where the PL is or where the NFL is.

Here is an example from another American league:

The symptoms of near disaster are plain enough: The Yankess make an almost annual farce of the AL pennant race…Interest in big-league baseball is on the downgrade. So is attendance, generally, in spite of glowing Yankee, Brave, and Dodger figures.

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Guess which year? It's written in 1958. Still, the MLB is doing pretty good and has actually had a higher growth than the NFL during the last 10 years.

Debatable. In fact, only a small number of clubs actually make money in the EPL. And it ain't Liverpool, Man Utd, Chelsea. Arsenal does, but only because of their huge property business on the side.
So I don't really understand what measure of 'success' you are applying.

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My metric was a combination of revenue, media attention, total team value, fan base size and popularity mixed together in my head by a formula to advanced to describe. In all seriousness, I just recalled some Forbes (lol it's actually true) list of the most successful sports leagues and it was topped by the Premiership and the NFL. The metric used was something like average or total team value. It might be off but if I would have ranked the leagues before I'd seen the list I'd put those two at the top so it passed the sniff test for me.

Don't get me wrong, I like the NFL and NBA model alot better than the PL model and I have no idea which one is the best. Heck, I even enjoy the tanking concept since it creates some buzz and alot of good jokes. I'm just opposing the conventional wisdom that competitive balance is of such great importance people tend to claim. It's clearly important to some degree but the payoff function around the optimum may be very flat and compared to other factors generating fan interest, it might have very little influence.

I'm just opposing the conventional wisdom that competitive balance is of such great importance people tend to claim. It's clearly important to some degree but the payoff function around the optimum may be very flat and compared to other factors generating fan interest, it might have very little influence.

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I did behavioural economics for a while, and you are pretty much spot on. People do not like a perfectly balanced league. They like their team to be slightly better than the opposing team at the time, like a 60-40 split. Because this way, they can take comfort before the event that they are likely to win, and if they lose, rely on an argument that the teams were evenly matched.

But the important thing to take from this is that having dominant forces within a league is less optimal than a perfectly balanced one.

On the discussion of eliminating tanking, imagine what the games would look like if the competition for the final playoff spots came down to only one or two games between four teams every year. If the 8th seed was <12 games behind the first seed near every year. That for me is exciting - and for a team, going to the playoffs has a higher payoff in revenue than a slightly higher draft pick. Tanking has a poor payoff matrix compared to competeting and becomes less widespread.

I really like the idea of locking in lottery positions mid-season. Building on that, what if we did this: divide the number of lottery balls in half. Award half the lottery balls to the teams based on their standings as you normally would, but at the All Star break. Award the remaining lottery balls to the teams who don't make the playoffs based on their post-allstar break record. So the bottom dweller that has the best post-allstar record gets the most number of balls from the second bag.

The only way a team can tank for the most number of balls would be to tank from the get-go for the worst record by the all-star break and then go on a tear for the rest of the season. Then again, that's eerily similar to what the Pistons did this year, albeit unintentionally.

All in all, so long as you have a system that tries to balance talent distribution by favoring losing teams, the teams will always jockey around for a worse record in hopes of improving their odds. I don't think you can fully eliminate tanking because of that. However, you can reduce it somewhat by making incremental changes.

I've been a lifelong soccer fan until I moved to Michigan in the late 90s. It is true that in most leagues in Europe there are a handful of teams that have a lock on championships, and these are your usual powerhouses. But, other teams also have very solid fanbases, even though they have absolutely no shot at winning the title. These teams have built their reputation on other things, such as never losing to a contender on their home court etc. They also have other avenues for success. Each league has a tournament that runs in parallel to the actual league. There are also opportunities for the non-contender teams to make it to Euroleague championships even if they don't win the title each year. With all of this, comes money from TV broadcasts, advertisings and FIFA/UEFA rewards. So, even if a team is not good enough to win a title, there are other doors that above average play in the league unlocks for them. NBA is quite one-dimensional when it comes to that.

Also, what most U.S. people don't realize is that leagues like EPL or Bundesliga or La Liga are not the only leagues in their respective countries. There is a tiered model where there are several lower level leagues, and at the end of the each season, the bottom 2-4 teams are demoted to a lower league. In the lower leagues, the revenue, prestige and attendance are also lower and your television coverage goes down the toilet. So, there are some very very tough games against bottom dwellers towards the end of the season. I have seen bottom dwellers destroy championship contenders just to avoid demotion more times than I can remember. Think about the Bobcats spanking San Antonio Spurs or the Heat despite all the starters playing. If the NBA and NBADL were truly integrated and the bottom 3 teams from the NBA were sent to NBADL every year, it would be a completely different ball game. But you can't do that because they are not structured that way.

Also, what most U.S. people don't realize is that leagues like EPL or Bundesliga or La Liga are not the only leagues in their respective countries. There is a tiered model where there are several lower level leagues, and at the end of the each season, the bottom 2-4 teams are demoted to a lower league. In the lower leagues, the revenue, prestige and attendance are also lower and your television coverage goes down the toilet. So, there are some very very tough games against bottom dwellers towards the end of the season. I have seen bottom dwellers destroy championship contenders just to avoid demotion more times than I can remember. Think about the Bobcats spanking San Antonio Spurs or the Heat despite all the starters playing. If the NBA and NBADL were truly integrated and the bottom 3 teams from the NBA were sent to NBADL every year, it would be a completely different ball game. But you can't do that because they are not structured that way.

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Firstly, what teams do you support? In the EPL etc?

I have heard this relegation argument a couple of times. I personally don't like it.

Secondly, there are two reasons that system can never work in the NBA.
- The EPL doesn't have a 'draft' system. They rely on club owned youth development and scouting.
- The damage that comes from relegation is irreperable. The financial cost is abhorrent and has led to many teams going into administration. The way they can work around this is by having very flexible wage costs. Teams in peril of being relegated have strict wage caps. NBA teams with $60 million dollar salary burdens could never shoulder this risk.

That and the commercial structure built around the team. There were exposes on the impact of the lockout on small businesses. I haven't followed Seattle after the move. Linwood would have a good idea.

I don't know if tanking needs to be eliminated beyond the current lottery system. As panda said, lottery picks rarely work out and bottom teams usually don't get to[p] picks. If you want to leverage a 7 win season on long odds, you should have that option.

I don't know if tanking needs to be eliminated beyond the current lottery system. As panda said, lottery picks rarely work out and bottom teams usually don't get to(p) picks. If you want to leverage a 7 win season on long odds, you should have that option.

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This is a good point.
If bottom feeding teams rarely get top picks, than the system which is designed to promote parity is flawed anyway. The league may as well focus their attention on eliminating taking rather than ensuring that the worst teams get the top picks since it doesn't work that irregardless.

Out of all the truly bad teams this year, I'm proud to say that our Pistons seemed to put forth the greatest effort to 'not tank' (even though many of us wanted them to). As bad as they sucked, I'm convinced that they tried to win despite not looking like they were at times..

Hopfully, the basketball gods will reward our Pistons with some karma when the pingpong balls fall into place.

This is a good point.
If bottom feeding teams rarely get top picks, than the system which is designed to promote parity is flawed anyway. The league may as well focus their attention on eliminating taking rather than ensuring that the worst teams get the top picks since it doesn't work that irregardless.

Out of all the truly bad teams this year, I'm proud to say that our Pistons seemed to put forth the greatest effort to 'not tank' (even though many of us wanted them to). As bad as they sucked, I'm convinced that they tried to win despite not looking like they were at times..

Hopfully, the basketball gods will reward our Pistons with some karma when the pingpong balls fall into place.

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I don't follow other teams that closely but I like our progress. It wasn't just a bright spot here and there involving one or two guys...the whole team showed improvement and cohesion. Its something good to carry into next year. Talent is still an issue though. We need to stockpile real talent.

I have heard this relegation argument a couple of times. I personally don't like it.

Secondly, there are two reasons that system can never work in the NBA.
- The EPL doesn't have a 'draft' system. They rely on club owned youth development and scouting.
- The damage that comes from relegation is irreperable. The financial cost is abhorrent and has led to many teams going into administration. The way they can work around this is by having very flexible wage costs. Teams in peril of being relegated have strict wage caps. NBA teams with $60 million dollar salary burdens could never shoulder this risk.

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I'm originally from Turkey, and the teams I followed were mostly in that league. It is structured in almost exactly the same way other Euro leagues are structured.

Also, I didn't mean to come out as advocating NBA adopting the relegation system. It really doesn't fit here at all. I was simply pointing out that when there is a definite and tangible penalty for being at the bottom of the league, it strongly discourages tanking. The only way I can see the concept being adopted at the NBA would be something along the lines of bottom teams losing lottery odds or something like that.

Also, I disagree that the damage of relegation is irreperable. I've seen several teams go down a level and then come back to the premier league after a few years. Yes, some of them are hurt forever, but most continue on.

Again, a system like that won't work in NBA who has trouble maintaining profitability for 30 teams.

The only way a team can tank for the most number of balls would be to tank from the get-go for the worst record by the all-star break and then go on a tear for the rest of the season. Then again, that's eerily similar to what the Pistons did this year, albeit unintentionally.

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It would really reward teams with injured superstars that recover by all-star break.

The NBA is pushing toward changes to the draft lottery system by next season but is facing a strong objection from the Philadelphia 76ers, the franchise that could suffer the most from it, multiple sources told ESPN.com.

Lottery-reform measures were introduced earlier this month at league meetings in Las Vegas, and the NBA Board of Governors could vote changes into place at its preseason meeting in October. Although there are several facets and the proposals haven't been finalized, the goal of commissioner Adam Silver is to balance out the lottery odds so the worst team or teams wouldn't have the highest chances of landing the top pick, sources said.

Currently, the team with the worst record has a 25 percent chance of landing the top pick and the team with the fifth-worst record has an 8.8 percent chance of winning it. In a new format, the bottom five or six teams could have an equal chance.

Grantland's Zach Lowe reported earlier this month on the NBA's proposed changes, which are essentially an attempt to squeeze the lottery odds at either extreme toward a more balanced system in which all 14 teams have a relatively similar chance at the no. 1 pick.
Although the NBA likely would not frame the changes this way, they could be seen as an anti-tanking measure, as teams with the worst records might not earn significantly higher lottery odds.

The rough draft of this plan was met with opposition by 76ers management, which is in the midst of a multiseason rebuilding project that is dependent on a high pick next year. The 76ers, sources said, are hoping to get the NBA to delay the plan's implementation for at least a year because it would act as a de facto punishment while just playing by the rules that have been in place.

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What an embarrassment the 76ers are. "Please wait a few years to implement this change to the lottery, because we bad and expect to be the worst team in the league this year." I would feel pretty awesome about that if I played for that team.

With that said, I kind of like the proposal. Spread out the odds a little more among the lottery teams, especially for the bottom 5 or 6.